Managed to avoid reviews and even turned the radio off this afternoon for ten minutes or so during the friday film show.
Would have preferred to have not watched it in a cinema full of stupid people who didn't seem to really understand what was going on but that's pretty much unavoidable on a Friday night.
Spotted some cool references and homages, I'm sure there are loads more though.

I'm either going to take him to the cabin in the woods, or I'm going to promise to take him and then not take him. But the one thing that I will never do is not tell him that I'm taking him to a cabin in the woods, and then not take him.

for a start, I don't know why this has been so heavily 'keep it spoiler free' or labelled a game changer because there is nothing there I haven't seen before really.

The plot is ridiculously bad, but what makes it worse is how po-faced and smug it seems to be. If you have a stupid plot, you've got to play it a bit tongue-in-cheek and light-heartedly, which is why say Evil Dead is so enjoyable.

I thought it was one of the funniest films I'd seen in ages, and clearly massively, massively tongue in cheek.

I can see that you might think it was smug and I can see that you might not LIKE its sense of humour, but I just don't see how you could possibly have watched that film and not thought it was light-hearted in tone...

for whatever reason I was more aware there was hype around this film than really got exposed to that hype, I didn't know much about it before I went other than it was by Joss Whedon and had good reviews. But I absolutely loathed Inception for basically the reasons you state here, whereas I thought this just had a real sense of fun to it.

Some nice ideas, but not nearly as clever as it thinks it is. Shame. Some really lazy writing in places too, most notably with a story-breaking plot hole near the end (it'd be a spoiler to mention it though).

I can see people wanting straight up scares might be disappointed, it's more like a violent black comedy (or something) than a horror film in the truest sense, but I thought it was an absolute hoot. I found all its postmodernisms a lot less grating than in Scream as well, it really had that sort of wicked joy of the 'fun' serieses of Buffy to it.

of all the possible options that the 'kids' could have ended up with in the sweepstakes scene? I only managed to read the left hand column; the best option being (The Evil Dead referencing)'Evil Molesting Tree'.

all of the reviews I'd read either said it was a game-changer for horror or a pointless cliche-laden borefest. I think both points of view are missing the point.

The 'horror' sections played knowingly but superbly executed, and the behind the scenes sections were hilarious. Not really a horror film but more of a big horror referencing comedy. Like Funny Games if it was a Sam Raimi film.

Thought there were plenty of similarities there not least the title splash.

I liked it a lot overall, I'm not sure it needed the actual real-life horror/apocalyptic plot though. I'd have been happier had it just remained a Truman Show style horror thing with the same questions asked of the viewer as to why we enjoy this kind of entertainment.

Adding the extra layer in felt a bit unnecessary to me and almost became the very thing it was subverting so well in the first place. Kind of like that point in Kick-Ass where it stops being a funny parody/subversion of the superhero film and just becomes a straight up superhero film (and not a very good one at that).

but if this was a really shitty film from the '80s it would be the MOST AWESOME FILM EVER.

Oh wait, we have Evil Dead/Evil Dead II, anyway.

The Cabin in the Woods was quite funny with some nice references, but it came across as a smug, clever schoolchild aware of his intelligence, the plot was all that amazingly shocking and deserving of being kept secret, it felt like it was trying to make a cult classic of itself, and having Sigourney Weaver put in a cameo for five minutes of exposition and then death was stupid (obvs. she should've appeared as a soldier fighting the monsters who was killed by a creature reminiscent of the alien out of Alien).

which to me says that it doesn't rest on any impenetrable smug only-nerds-allowed set of references that bar lay-people from enjoying the movie.

Buffy, the works of Simon Pegg, Scott Pilgrim, all packed with similar degrees of references but you don't need to get them to enjoy the show. The references are a treat, a little bonus if you get them, but not essential to viewing the movie cold. Which to me says it's not that smug.

it's crammed full of obscure stuff that hinders your enjoyment. I think I have a problem with films which sort of mix up with the tropes, I absolutely detested Scott Pilgrim, thought Kick Ass was average at best and Shaun of the Dead tedious. I think when you make a film like that there is some sort of smugness about it.

I also really don't like everyone going on about its originality when it's really not

(bajillions of films have loads and loads of references, as we've established, it's an okay thing to do).

The smugness was mostly in those curveballs and changes and it getting more and more daft. It was as if they were thinking more ways to 'surprise' the audience. There was a general feeling of 'I bet they didn't see THAT coming!'

Of course I didn't see it coming. It's a fucking unicorn! (Which was pretty funny.)

I watched it for the first time the other week, I thought it had some good ideas but was really underdeveloped, I think the pre reveal first part of the film wasnt really up to much, it would have been better if that part worked as a strong stand alone horror but it didnt it just seemed like a really long introduction to the real film which then felt really rushed at the end

then flip it around with the meta-stuff and the technology and that, but was kinda ruined by all the talk of it, I can see people going in to see what they think is another horror flick and getting cabin in the woods must have had a load of fun/confusion with it.

with a feminist friend who really, really missed the point and was making sarcastic comments like "oh yeah so there's some teens and they're going to a cabin the woods? REAL ORIGINAL GUYS" and also "i hope the first person to die is the MAN who wrote these TERRIBLY CLICHED FEMALE CHARACTERS"

They introduce the control facility place pretty much immediately- right from the off the audience is informed and involved in what is really going on. There's pretty much no attempt made whatsoever to shroud anything. The whole thing works on the assumption that you get silly horror tropes and most of the references are to really well known, basic canon monsters. The audience is invited to feel smart, smarter than all of the characters and the film, not the other way round.

one thing that did jar with me a bit was how they just managed to collect all these mythological creatures/ghosts/monsters over the years. Or indeed why they went to all the bother rather than just sacrificing them kids Aztec style.

and the best I can remember is a quip from one of the characters making a joke precisely out of that second point. Stoner guy says something along the lines of what's wrong with just tying some people to sacred stones (or something).

With the exception of Avengers, which I loved as much as anyone who never bothered with Marvel can, I've not really got into anything Whedon's done post-Serenity.

Dollhouse had some great actors in who weren't Dushku / that guy from BSG, and some good ideas amongst the dull stuff, and Agents of SHIELD is almost fun but lacks a great cast, Dr. Jen from ER excepted. Cabin in the Woods just felt a bit flat.

is that it's absolutely 100% perfect franchise material - something that could easily be repeated with some variation across a series of films, and we all know how much the big studios like their yearly autumn horror movies - and yet the end of the film absolutely precludes that.

it's bit of fun really, but nowhere near as original or clever as people make out. Scream was doing the same meta thing almost two decades ago.
i find that i'm going off horror genre in general, seen so many really hyped horror films lately that were a complete anticlimax. i prefer the ones that know they're a bit shit and just get on with it